Contact centers, call centers and/or organizations or businesses utilize various means to interact with clients, customers or other parties. In particular, electronic mail (email) and chat applications are common communication channels in modern contact or call centers. Of great importance to an operation of a contact center is the selection of an agent to handle an incoming call, session or interaction.
For telephone calls, such a selection may be made by simply routing an incoming call based on an availability of an agent, e.g., using switching equipment to switch or connect an incoming call to an agent not currently engaged in another call. The contact center may employ Interactive Voice Response (IVR) or Automated Voice Response (AVR) in order to obtain information from a caller and, based on input from the caller, route the call or session to an agent.
In contrast, in modern contact centers, an agent can interact simultaneously with a number of customers, e.g., by e-mail or electronic chat communication. Accordingly, the availability of an agent may no longer be necessarily determined by simply determining whether the agent is currently hosting another session. Other operational modes and capabilities of modern infrastructure may be attributed to the routing capabilities of a packet-switched networks as well as to the capacity of packet switching infrastructure to store and/or process packets and forward them to a destination at a later time and/or forward packets based on processing of the packets.
It will be appreciated that for simplicity and clarity of illustration, elements shown in the figures have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements may be exaggerated relative to other elements for clarity. Further, where considered appropriate, reference numerals may be repeated among the figures to indicate corresponding or analogous elements.